Erica Jensen is co-owner and President of Clean Right Company. A Spokane based cleaning service provider, since 2002, for home and office, carpets, windows and post construction cleaning.

Friday, June 7, 2013

The Continuation of creating a comprehensive application process to filter the potentials from the qualified

Over the past 11 years of being an employer in the cleaning service industry, my partner and I have read thousands (if not tens of thousands) of applications and resumes, have hired hundreds of people and have parted ways with most. Through this journey we have learned what type of people work well within our organization and what type do not.

Unfortunately, finding the right employee is like finding a needle in a haystack. There is a huge population of unemployed persons that are all applying for the same jobs. So how do we find the right people within this mountain of applications and resumes? My partner and I have developed a hiring system that includes a series of steps, which we will discuss in a series of blog posts, that give us an insight as to which applicants are worth knowing more about.

This blog post is a continuation of a series of posts on how to find the "perfect" employees for your cleaning service business. If you haven't already, read the previous posts which are linked below.

In our last issue we discussed how to put together an application and the information you should obtain. This issue, we are going to focus on what type of application you will use and where to post your employment advertisement.

Paper or Electronic?

Meaning, how do you want to gather your applications? Do you want to gather paper applications or do you want them sent to you electronically or perhaps both? This is a question only you can answer. If you are comfortable with technology I would suggest taking advantage of that which will save some trees and yourself some time! Clean Right Co ONLY takes applications electronically and it is a very specific process. We DO NOT accept resumes that are emailed or faxed or resumes period for that matter. We ONLY accept the application, that we have put together, and is submitted through our website. I advise choosing one application style and sticking to it so you can quickly, easily and efficiently read through applications to find your "perfect" hire. Because we use the electronic application the rest of this post will focus on using technology but I will touch on the use of paper applications and resumes. Plus, you can adapt our electronic version to fit your needs.

Where to post your employment advertisement.

There are a multitude of ways you can do this, some are free and some are not. We use free options as, to this point, it works for us. Regardless, listed are some options to choose from and how they work.

Craigslist -We use Craigslist to post our employment ad. Many potential applicants will use this site to search for jobs and you can refresh your ad every couple days so that it is on the top of their listings.

Work Source -This is a state run program, in our state, that people have free access to search for jobs from. It is also free for the employer to post employment ads to their website.

Various Other Free Listing Sites -There are a multitude of websites that you can post your employment ad on for free so you'll need to do some research to see what sites are known in your area and that will attract local talent. I would stick to sites that you can submit a listing to in your local area. An example is Craigslist where you can narrow down the area your listing shows up by using your "local" Craigslist page. I would stay away from sites that post your ad nationwide. This may sound like a good idea, as your listing will get seen by more people, but why would you want to waste your time reading a hundred applications from people that live in another city or state?

Paid Listing Sites -There are also a plethora of sites that you can pay to post your employment ad on such as Monster or HelpWanted.com. We stay away from these because we have not had the need to use them. I would use them as a last resort because you want to keep the cost of obtaining a new employee as low as possible. As well, the majority of the people searching for a job on these types of sites are not going to be looking for a cleaning position. They are going to be people with degrees looking for a job related to their field of interest.

Local Temp & Job Placement Agencies -This is a great way to have another company aid in your hiring process. They can be the "front line" of your defenses against unwanted applicants. However, they charge a premium for this service. A Temp-To-Hire set up will cost you an inflated hourly wage and sometimes a lump sum fee if you choose to hire the person on. However, this may be beneficial to you as you can 'try' people out for any length of time and, if they don't cut the mustard, you simply have the agency send you someone else. They also take care of paying and filling all employment taxes (though you are paying for it in your bill to them along with a bit extra for their business). Job placements agencies are different as they usually aren't focused on finding people "temp" jobs. They are also different as some charge the applicant a fee, not the employer, to have access to the jobs listed with them.

Newspaper Advertisement -This is old hat. We do not use the newspaper as it is not widely used in our area but, if it is still a hot commodity in your neck of the woods, then you should run an employment ad in it.

It all boils down to what works in your area and for your company. Are you technologically acute or are you behind in the electronics realm? We use technology in our hiring process so we use the web as our go to for our employment listings.

In our next post, we will talk about Gathering and Filtering your applications. We use a complete electronic hiring process so I will be focusing on using technology more than the "old Fashioned" paper process. However, the same principals apply to either process so you can still find very useful tips and information that you can customize for your processes.

Until then, I hope this post and it's predecessors have been informative and useful. Please don't hesitate to discuss and comment. Thank you for reading, Erica Jensen -President Clean Right Co